The chatter continues about the Tucson shooting, but there's nothing new
to be said. There are those who don't want to see a perfectly good crisis to
go to waste: surely they can get something out of this shooting, what with a
Member of Congress being shot and surviving by what the doctors are calling
a miracle, her astronaut husband, a charming little girl, an elderly man who
died trying to protect his wife -- this is the stuff from which epics are
made. Surely we can get some gun control legislation, and a curb on Beck and
Limbaugh and their sympathizers, and if we can't get a curb we can still give
them a black eye. And so the chatter continues.

There is less discussion about madness, psychiatry, and the law. Forty
years ago the public had a great deal more confidence in "science", and the
medical and psychological sciences had a lot more confidence in their
theories, and in England and the United States it was a great deal easier to
get someone locked away in a madhouse. One classic case in England involved
a nutty old man who lived in his own country house; he kept chickens, and
apparently the chickens were happy. They were allowed free range. The free
range included not only their chicken house but his own house, so that the
sanitary conditions in his living room were a bit appalling. On the other
hand he never invited anyone into his house, and his interactions with his
neighbors and the local village were sparse: he mostly lived on eggs and
boiled chicken and carrots he grew for himself. A local group called on him
soliciting donations or something of the sort, saw the horrid conditions in
his house, and reported him to the local authorities. Next thing he knew a
police constable and a local doctor appeared with a warrant and took him
before a local magistrate, and shortly thereafter his house was set afire as
an unsanitary menace, and he was given a hearing presided over by the chief
medical officer of the local madhouse. Testimony was given by the constable
and the doctor.

He was found to be raving, shouting defiance and denouncing the
government, and expressing the view that he was being persecuted. He was
confined to the madhouse for treatment, but given that he was hostile there
wasn't really any treatment. He stayed there for years until a local MP was
told of the case by a distant relative, and the whole thing came to an
actual court. He was found to be peculiar and perhaps weird, but not insane
under any legal definition. Of course he was by then destitute, and
homeless. He begged to be allowed to live on a tent on his property, but the
property had been confiscated for taxes, and then sold to a developer who
turned out to be related to the charity solicitors who reported the old man
in the first instance.

This was not an entirely isolated case. We had many in the United States
as well. One man was confined as a sex offender for urinating in public and
thus exposing himself to some kids hiding in the bushes. The man was drunk
at the time. The psychiatrists who examined him found that although he had
never committed any other crime he was schizophrenic, and confined him to
the state mental hospital until he could be cured, but since there was at
the time no known cure for schizophrenia there was no treatment: he served
what amounted to a life sentence for urinating against a wall at 2 in the
morning. The case was found by a graduate student doing research on such
matters and taken on by a law professor, and the man was eventually freed,
but after twelve years of confinement he had no job or income. When last
heard from he was living in a Mission in San Francisco.

I could cite a number of similar cases in England and the United States
from the 1950's when I was in graduate school, and I suspect I could find
some even today although the budget crunches were instrumental in emptying
some of the mad houses. The emptying of the asylums was hailed by
libertarians as an advance for freedom, but it also put some very crazy
people on the streets. I recall one famous case about 1972 of a girl in New
York City who liked living on the streets and begging for a living. She made
for pathetic pictures, disheveled but smiling, sitting outside Sack's Fifth
Avenue. I forget the final disposition of her case, but there were some very
high powered lawyers on both sides, both claiming to want what was best for
her: one side said freedom, the other side said she needed help even if she
didn't think she did. As I said, we can find many cases in which it is not
entirely clear who ought to be locked up and helped whether they like it or
not.

But I don't hear much discussion of principles here. Should the Tucson
shooter have been locked away after it became clear to many that he was
deteriorating? On what grounds? That he asked weird questions and seemed
obsessed with epistemological and semantic questions (although his education
probably never included the definition of the words)? It turns out that he
kept a form letter from the Congresswoman on which he had written 'Die
Bitch' or something of the sort; but he kept that private, didn't show it to
anyone. Still, if that had been found along with his Glock, should he have
been taken in for questioning? If he were taken in for questioning would
that have resulted in his involuntary confinement? Or in disarming him? And
on what grounds might there have been a search of his belongings that would
reveal the marked up letter and the Glock?

Go back to the Virginia Tech massacre.

In two separate attacks, approximately two
hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people and wounded
many others before committing suicide. The massacre is the deadliest
peacetime shooting incident by a single gunman in United States history, on
or off a school campus.

Cho was known to be disturbed and in fact received publicly paid-for
treatment from mental health professionals. They certainly had more
opportunity to predict his action than anyone had regarding Jared Loughner.
Should Cho have been locked away? Disarmed? On what specific grounds, and
through what procedures?

Liberty is not free. It is also not limitless. There must be some limits.
Rational self government requires a degree of rationality. But depriving a
citizen of freedom should be a very serious action, and the result of
specific procedures, not just at the whim of someone who says "he's nuts."
Note that no one wants to jail the Tucson survivor who made quite a public
threat against the local Tea Party leader.

I continue to be amazed that there is still debate and discussion about
the motives of the Tucson shooter, and whose fault it was that he was able
to carry out his attack. There wasn't anything like that much discussion of
the Fort Hood Massacre, where the motive was clear -- he was shouting his
jihidist sentiments even as he fired -- and his affiliations with Muslim
jihadists were easily discovered. His behavior had disturbed many of his
colleagues and superiors. Because we simply refuse to believe that Muslim
jihadists can recruit agents within our armed forces, or that we are allowed
to do anything about them lest we be accused of profiling and discrimination
and mopery and dopery, we are not supposed to talk about remedies to an
obvious threat; but we are supposed to think of ways to profile the mad and
lock them away.

I find that I am not making myself as clear on this issue as I might be:

Involuntary Commitment

Jerry,

You are cherry-picking your examples of involuntary
psych commitments. I can cite far more cases where somebody dangerous
should have been committed/treated (if we had the system for that anymore)
but are allowed on the street and they continue to harm themselves or
others. Yes, these people have already proven themselves dangerous but due
to our current psychiatric/criminal justice system they continue to remain
in public where they continue to cause serious harm to themselves and
others.

I agree there were people who did not commit
felonies or harm others before they were committed, that does not mean
that there should not be a mechanism for examining people to determine
danger/competency.

By your same argument, one can never prosecute or
lock up felons. Some of them are undoubtedly innocent yet we still lock up
felons.

Loughner was not some 'harmless crank' making weird
statements. He threatened to kill people, he was such a disturbance in
school that police had to make him leave, he was abusing drugs, etc. There
were enough warning signs that in a rational society we could have had him
committed for three days or a week to determine if he was dangerous.

If he was determined to not be a danger, then we
could have let him go live with his family, rant on the internet, and
smoke ganga until his brain became resin coated. If he was dangerous,
(e.g. believed that his congressman was a doppelganger and needed to be
killed to be exposed) we would have laws preventing him from purchasing a
gun and perhaps a court could mandate a monitored medication regime as a
requirement for living outside the institution.

Freedom isn't free, that's why some people in any
society have to 'take one for the team'. If somebody is making clear death
threats, cannot self monitor to the point they are escorted out of places
by police, and have many other indications they are a danger to themselves
or others they can suffer a temporary loss of liberty so we can have some
assurance they will not harm themselves or others. Innocent people
convicted of crimes go to jail, we as a society acknowledge it and move
on. If in these cases some 'harmless' people were committed long enough to
determine their possible danger we as a society can pay that price.

In a free society we can ask that adults who cannot
monitor their own behavior in public to the point they are obviously
disturbed and committing crimes to let us determine if they are a danger.
A week long commitment to an institution is not a minor thing but if you
made the police agency pay for the initial commitment most agencies would
monitor the commitment carefully. Nothing is perfect, the criminal justice
system is perfect but few want to scrap it wholesale or make it voluntary.
Neither should the mental health system be totally voluntary (which it
virtually is at this time). Those people who are locked up on an
involuntary basis have been committed because they committed crimes but
are too disturbed even for jail.

Freedom isn't free, I agree. I understand somebody
your age will have a visceral dislike of mental institutions (they were
remarkably ugly in ages past and are not pretty now). That is no reason to
let your own personal likes and dislikes blind you to the obligations of a
free society.

In a free society can an innocent man run from
police, assault them, maybe kill them to prevent his arrest? After all he
knows he is innocent. Can an innocent man break the law and escape from
prison? Can he assault guards because he is innocent and they are
depriving him of liberty? Can he damage property to protest his innocence
by burning down the prison? No, the man must pay the price society has
wrongly meted out. All of these cases are serious violations of a person's
dignity and liberty.

These cases are just as egregious and more
unpleasant to the person involved than a three day commitment to determine
competency but we as a society allow them to happen every day. We must or
we would have no criminal justice system. We as a society accept that this
will happen and most of us never even think about it.

We lose no liberty if instead of doing nothing when
someone has made direct death threats, shown serious signs of mental
illness, and has had multiple run-ins with police, we get them assessed
and maybe some help. No one I am aware of wants to round up the mentally
ill and put them in indiscriminately in institutions. What a rational and
free society does with its dangerous mentally ill is a harder question
then what do we do with criminals but we need to do something. Letting
them out to harm themselves and others is not courageous or rational.

Thanks for your great site,

Don

Which is disturbing. Of course I was choosing examples of maximum
ambiguity. That was the point. It's clear enough that if someone stands about
waving a gun and shouting that he's going to kill the Mayor because the
Mayor kidnapped his son, we have good reason to act. It's the hard cases
that make bad law, and I have been inviting those who think it's simple to
contemplate that.

Regarding the possibility of jailing -- or executing for that matter --
an innocent man, I thought that was my point: we don't do that after a
closed hearing before experts. It takes a judge and jury. Involuntary
commitment without that safeguard was, I thought, what we were discussing.
Jailing a felon requires a charge, a specification, indictment or
preliminary hearing, and conviction involving a judge and the option of a
jury. Locking someone away for "observation" requires a lot less than
indictment: and unless there are rules, extending the "protection" of the
society by locking away a madman is a fairly simple matter. Of course I
chose the cases intended to make the point. Why shouldn't I/

As to the obligations of a free society, I thought that this was the
point of the discussion. A free society may have the "obligation" to protect
people from madmen who have not yet committed a crime, but doing so on the
basis of the findings of an expert who can find a correspondence between the
individual's behavior and a "disorder" in the DSM is probably not a good
idea.

I had no idea that anyone was aware of "direct death threats" made by
the Tucson madman. I find no evidence that this is the case. And I do not
think he had done anything that would warrant a search warrant that would
have found the ravings on his copy of the letter that the Congresswoman had
sent him.

I would hope that your statement "No one
I am aware of wants to round up the mentally ill and put them in
indiscriminately in institutions," is true, but I fear I do know of
such people, some in the mental health professions; and when you have a
board consisting of a policeman, a police psychiatrist, and the chief
medical officer of a mental institution given the power to send people for
involuntary treatment I would contend that you have conflicts of interest.

It's very easy to say that letting people out to harm
themselves or others is not rational. At what probability will you set this?
If there is a 99% probability that someone will go berserk the decision is
easy. Suppose the probability is only 60%? What about 10%? At some point
there is a probability that anyone you meet might go berserk and harm
himself or others, or take drugs that will induce that state. Leaving aside
the difficulty of measuring the probabilities (who does it, and how? By
comparing behavior to DSM disorders?) can we not at least discuss the levels
of probability? At what level is preventive detention both rational and
courageous?

In a free society we can ask that adults
who cannot monitor their own behavior in public to the point they are
obviously disturbed and committing crimes to let us determine if they are a
danger.

But surely the trick is to find a reliable way to determine
who can and who cannot monitor his own behavior, and at what point is
someone obviously so disturbed? Is it walking down the street talking loudly
to no one? (Once we determine it's not a cell phone...) Or pretending to
have a cell phone conversation with God or the Devil? Now I know: sometimes
people are just acting nuts; we can't define it but we know it when we see
it. We have laws against being drunk and dirty in public, and those can
often be used to get someone off the streets even when they aren't really
drunk.

I do wish such things were as obvious to me as they are to
you.

===

Meanwhile, I
would think it more important to look into ways to prevent another Fort Hood
massacre, or Times Square Bombing. It seems to me odd that there is more
concerned with involuntary commitment of madmen than in detecting and
disarming conspirators. And yes, I know very well that this is an even
larger can of worms, and those familiar with my writings will not suspect
that I am arguing for new empowerments for the secret police. It does seem
odd that there is more national concern and debate about Tucson than Fort
Hood -- or Waco.

===============

A note: I am
aware of the "modern" psychiatric terminology with its various DSM "disorders."
I don't find them either more or less useful than the older designations of
psychotic behavior. They (the new labels of 'disorders') aren't more predictive
(than the older diagnoses of schizophrenia and manic-depressive psycholsis), and they don't seem to be
based on any superior theories. I do not find the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual particularly useful, and I am not pleased by the insurance companies'
reliance on this expert system data base, which allows us to apply the term
"disorder" to many behaviors that previously would simply have been thought
odd or eccentric, or even (in the case of adolescent boys) rather typical.
Psychology theory is in a mess nowadays. We have made progress in showing
the unscientific nature of the great integrative theories of Freud, Jung. Horney, Hubbard, and the like; but we haven't got much to replace them with,
and the DSM isn't in my judgment a particularly good substitute. At least
Freud and Hubbard offered explanations even when they weren't particularly
useful for prediction.

For years the Global Warming Believers have been warning
Australia they were in increasing danger of drought, not flooding, and as a
consequence a number of building codes forbidding construction in flood
plains have been repealed. Other flood control measures were scrapped in
favor of drought prevention.

NASA Says OtherwiseScientists at NASA, however, have identified a different reason.

"The copious rainfall is a direct result of
La Nina's effect on the Pacific trade winds and has made tropical
Australia particularly rainy this year,” said NASA oceanographer David
Adamec in a press statement.

The southern Pacific Ocean periodically
undergoes El Nino (warmer) and La Nina (cooler) conditions. This year the
Pacific Ocean is undergoing a particularly strong La Nina, which delivers
heavy rainfall to areas that are normally dry, such as Brisbane,
Australia.

I often hear Believers say that Global Warming causes
drought. They point to receding glaciers, and the lack of snow on Mount
Kilimanjaro as confirmation of the danger of AGW. I do not know how the
various models from which AGW is inferred deal with rainfall as a result of
Global Warming. I do know that at one time some theorists said that they'd
expect more cooling than warming from atmospheric warming by CO2, but those
were cocktail party theories: it's clear that if you are going to have
glacial ice in the high latitudes, something has to transport that water to
the places where it falls as snow. That will take energy. Adding energy to
the atmosphere may cause more evaporation and thus larger rainfalls. In
fact, though, the models don't seem to deal with this very well.

Since El Nino and La Nina affect our weather, and probably
our climate, a lot more than CO2 levels do, one would expect to see more
concentration on those phenomena, but so far as I know, little of the
enormous funding of "Climate Change" research is devoted to those, and
predictions of ocean conditions do not seem to be any part of the objectives
of those studies.

As I have said before, Bayesian analysis would indicate that
we ought to spend more money on resolving the prediction uncertainties -- or
determining that those uncertainties cannot be lowered -- rather than
choosing an outcome and spending large sums on that. Apparently Australia
chose to prepare for drought and cut way back on flood control.

Ideas have consequences. Australia took AGW Believer
predictions seriously. We see the results.

And yes: I know, the correct term now is "climate change",
and that the Climate Change Believers are now saying that warming doesn't
inevitably cause drought, at least the ones who really understand, and they
can't help it if some of their supporters are uninformed and continue to
show us drought areas depicted as resulting from Global Warming, and it
isn't worth setting that record straight because It's Really Serious and
even if people are scared for the wrong reason....

==============

Measure

I am tempted to try to determine the temperature at Chaos
Manor. That turns out not to be too simple. I could just put up a recording
thermometer, but where? What do I measure, air temperature in the shade?
Globe temperature exposed to the sky? I have been mulling this over, and
it's not really likely I will do this, but someone ought to: get three
recording thermometers. Set one up according to whatever standard is used
for taking a temperature for the climate data base. That will be air
temperature in the shade as I understand it. Now set up two more, both globe
temperature measures: that is take a copper ball about 4 inches in diameter,
paint it black, and put the recording air temperature thermometer inside
that. This will measure both air and radiant temperatures. Have two of
those. Put one in the shade, and expose the other to the sky. Now build a
data base of hourly measurements (day and night, of course) from all three,
and compare the differences. We can then try to work out a system of weights
to allow us to average all three measures to get daily, weekly, monthly, and
annual average temperatures from one particular place. It would be
interesting to see the results.

I haven't looked at the cost of recording thermometers
recently, or for that matter where I would find copper globes, and I suspect
I'll never do this: but it would make a very good 8th grade science project
for schools.

============

The egregious Frum continues to get major space from the
mainstream media. Why?

"Even if you don't think we should be
there," says Mr. Hake, "you should want us to be successful as long as
we are there. This is the time to lean forward and this private support
is one way to do it."

The quote pretty well expresses my view of this war. I don't think we
ought to be in it: we can't afford it, it is not a good thing for the health
of the Legions to spend a large part of their active service in a place that
has been a graveyard of empires since Alexander the Great, and building a
liberal democracy ruled from Kabul will require commitments that our
soldiers cannot give because they are beyond the commitment of the American
people. But so long as we are in that war, we have no choice but to give our
Centurions whatever we can manage; and crazy "ethics" rules that prevent a
small town in Ohio from sending a sewing machine to the company commander of
their local Guard unit stationed at Fire Base Forsaken in the midst of the
Hindu Kush for distribution to the local headman's wife are an insane
restriction on the abilities of the Legions to accomplish the mission we
have assigned them.

It's not likely that anything will change with the current Commander in
Chief.

==============

The unhealthy attention being paid to the odd thinking processes of the
sheriff of Pima County continue even as the story has gone beyond the
bizarre. The sheriff has repeatedly stated that he has no evidence to show
that the Tucson madman had ever listened to political radio commentators of
any opinion, nor did he read political editorials, nor does the sheriff have
any claim to expertise on discerning the motives of the mad, but he has his
weeks in the sun, and the media continue to interview him as if anything he
has to say has national relevance.

Meanwhile, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has thrown a state
dinner for the man who has imprisoned the winner of the 2010 Nobel Peace
Prize. Another previous Nobel Peace Prize winner was in attendance at this
honor. Except for Rush Limbaugh I have heard no comments on this curious
anomaly from the media. I suspect that when there is media attention it will
be in denigration of Limbaugh for pointing it out. So it goes.

===============

The US is in essence admitting that China will soon
be "Number One", overtaking and passing the United States in both economic
and military power. This is the path of incompetent empire.

Rational US policies would study the measures that put the United States
into "Number One" in the first place, and what changes in those policies
have resulted in the current worry that we will no longer remain there.
After all, we have not been defeated in war. We have not suffered widespread
destruction from natural disasters. We have had hurricanes, floods, oil
spills, earthquakes, terrorist attacks, but all of them added together
didn't have that much effect or show that we could not deal with them.
China, after all, is not without its disasters.

Rational US policies would look to our capabilities. We know what brings
prosperity: freedom and low cost energy. We also need to reform education.
Transparency and Subsidiarity.
I wrote about that many
years ago, and I have no reason to change that view.

============

I got this last night, but I didn't
see it until just now:

For those of you anywhere near
southern California tomorrow, the largest rocket ever to be launched from
Vandenberg Air Force Base, a Delta IV Heavy, is scheduled to blast off
sometime between 1:08 and 1:23 p.m.

That's Thursday, Jan 20. Clouds
permitting, it could be visible for hundreds of miles (I once saw a
Vandenberg night launch from Flagstaff, Arizona!). Payload classified.

This morning's LA Times
has an article on page 13 "Warming effect of melting ice fields stronger
than predicted, report finds."
This link is to the article in another place. It certainly makes sense,
and indeed I am a bit surprised that this effect wasn't in the original
models. It's also a clue as to where we ought to be doing more research.
Certainly as the ice and snow is replaced by water and tundra the radiation
reflected will be less. Ice is shiner than water. It also in the polar
regions, which get less sunlight and always at a low angle of incidence.
What effect this has isn't clear: intuitively that ought to make it warmer,
and that's certainly the prediction to make. The next step is to measure it:
how much? At a minimum I'd hope they would put more air and globe
temperature measuring instruments into the area to see just what happens.
How much warmer, and does that correlate with temperatures in more temperate
regions? It's the sort of activity that probably ought to be sponsored by
government, but it's also the kind of thing amateurs used to do in the age
of exploration.

Flanner [University of Michigan research team
leader] and his colleagues measured ice and snow between 1979 and 2008.
They found that ice and snow in the Northern Hemisphere are now reflecting
on average 3.3 watts of solar energy per square meter back to space, a
reduction of 0.45 watts per square meter over three decades.

In snow- and ice-covered regions, Flanner
said, "observations show a stronger response to recent warming than
anticipated." But he noted that the Arctic melting is just one of the
major factors that will influence the future climate. "Changes in
atmospheric water and clouds are the two other big players," he said.

It is, of course, the effect on atmospheric water and clouds that we
ought to be measuring. We know it was warmer in those regions in Viking
times -- well, 'know' may be a bit strong, but it's a very fair inference.
If there were dairy farms in Greenland it's safe to assume there was a lot
of melting all across the Northwest Passage area -- but we don't really know
what effect that had on global temperatures. Certainly the warming in the
Viking period was not caused by CO2 in the atmosphere (but it undoubtedly
released some additional CO2 by warming the seas). It would be very valuable
to know what did cause that warming, and, perhaps more importantly, what
stopped and reversed it so that we had the Little Ice Age. This is the kind
of climatology study that we ought to be doing, and we have the instruments
to do it with. Access to those areas is much easier now than it was in the
last century. Instruments like recording thermometers are much cheaper as is
wireless transmission of the data. A program of direct measurement of air
and globe temperatures in those areas coupled with satellite observations
(thus giving the satellite observations a calibration means) would not cost
much compared to, say, California's carbon control regulations. If we have
to endure the economic costs of CO2 reduction it would be well to have good
evidence that the Earth is actually warming and the warming is going to cost
more than the cost of abating it. So far the costs of warming are more
speculative than based on evidence or even careful analysis.

Of course the real danger is runaway warming or cooling. If all that is
happening is cycling among historic temperature levels -- and there isn't
any real evidence is that's not what is happening -- then we needn't be so
alarmed. If CO2 levels really do threaten a runaway process, we need to face
that. Retarding development in the United States while China and India add
more coal fired plants (as well as nuclear plants) isn't going to have much
effect on CO2. Preventing China and India from belching out CO2 may be
beyond our ability. Shaming the Chinese and Indians into cutting back their
economic development may also be a commission impossible of fulfillment. Now
what?

It would certainly be prudent to fund research into engineering methods
for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere in carload lots. The first cut at
doing it by seeding the seas with iron didn't come out as well as we could
hope: but it did produce the predicted blooms. Now it's a matter of
controlling that plankton growth so that it's sustainable. I suspect that's
not as difficult as persuading the Chinese not to build more coal fired
power plants...

Note that the new study only shows that melting ice in the polar regions
has more local effect than theory had supposed; it does not tell us more
about the rate of planetary warming or cooling. Note also, though, that this
is not relevant to the desirability of more research into measurement, and
into engineering ways to reduce CO2 if that turns out to be required.

I know no more about the following link. It is interesting
if true, but I tend to be skeptical of these things, as I am of the various
Dean Drive experiments people call
my attention to. I always wait for confirmation, and alas, I never find it.

The Iraq marsh may be a last remnant of
wetlands that spurred urban evolution.

In his dying moments, Goethe's Faust foresees
a happy day when a nearby foul swamp is replaced by green and fertile
fields “where men and herds may gain swift comfort from the new-made
earth.” He might have had a more benign view of marshlands had he pored
over the data gathered by a young archaeologist who recently led the first
American archaeological research team to Iraq in a quarter-century. She
suggests that cities and civilization didn't rise along riverbanks, as
most archaeologists have supposed, but out of swamps, which provided rich
animal and plant resources to complement irrigation agriculture and animal
husbandry. “Almost everywhere we look,” says Jennifer Pournelle of the
University of South Carolina, Columbia, “the biggest and earliest [human
settlements] are in that marsh environment.”

Pournelle is on a quest to understand the
role of marshes in southern Iraq between 4000 B.C.E. and 3000 B.C.E., when
humans first began to live in a network of cities. After a decade of work
with satellite and aerial images, she and two colleagues finally got a
chance to see the region up close last September, on an expedition with
the University of Basra. She presented the team's findings at a meeting in
November and hopes to return to Iraq this year.

If she is right, says her former adviser,
Guillermo Algaze of the University of California, San Diego, “we may have
to rethink how Mesopotamian civilization began.” “It's very intriguing,”
adds archaeologist Jason Ur of Harvard University. “She's proposing a
radically different environmental context for the first cities.” But
additional on-the-ground data will be crucial to convince interested but
skeptical colleagues. <snip>

If you have any interest in the subject the rest of the SCIENCE article
is worth reading. Causing archeologists/anthropologists/historians to
rethink their theories of how Mesopotamian civilization -- the Garden of
Eden -- began is no mean feat.

==========

For those who missed this:

OUTIES: A novel by Dr. Jennifer Pournelle. For those
who don't know, she's my daughter, an anthropologist/archeologist,
university publications editor, former Army Intelligence officer, and a
generally good writer.
http://www.newbrooklandpress.com/purchase

Recommended.

The
direct link to Amazon sales is here. It can be read with Kindle application software on all
machines that will run Kindle apps. Note that the Amazon subtitle is "Mote
in God's Eye" and that isn't correct: this is set in the Mote universe, but
it takes place off in the boonies.

OUTIES is "authorized" and boasts blurbs by Niven and me. It
makes use of the Mote universe and some of the Mote characters with our
permission. Good reading.

there seems to be an obvious link between
temperature and CO2. If, as the climate change people say, CO2 is the
driver and temperature lags behind, then we should get a runaway effect.
If, as I believe is likely, temperature change is the driver and CO2
follows behind, the CO2 would drop when the temperature drops again. There
would be some greenhouse synergy, but in either case after each cycle the
CO2 just drops back down again.

there were long periods where the atmosphere held 15
to 20 times the CO2 it does now. And life (at least in the oceans)
thrived. If we were going to have a runaway effect, we’d already look like
Venus.

Tom Brosz

was interesting, and I was looking at the links before commenting. I will
publish it again with comments; but I bring it up today because the second
link

leads to a very interesting UCSD course. To get there I
followed the links back to the introduction and syllabus
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/
climatechange1/cc1syllabus.shtml and began at the beginning. I find it
interesting and well worth the time of anyone with a serious interest in
this matter. What got me interested was that in the original link was
this statement:

To what extent should the answers
generated from such models be trusted? Consider this: if there are a dozen
processes which we need to understand, and we only grasp each process within
an error of 20 percent, the sum-total of the error adds to more than 200
percent! That is, if we now state that the content of carbon dioxide in the
air so many million years ago had to be X, the true answer could be anywhere
between 3 times X (200% more than stated) and X divided by 3 (200% less).
Even if we make the reasonable assumption that half of the errors will
cancel, we still get roughly a factor of two error on either side of the
uncertainty statement. Thus, at the present state of knowledge, computing
the answers will get us ballpark estimates and overall trends but not much
more. Now you can appreciate why the range of errors plotted in the figure
above are so large.

Most of the course is in this vein. Part One of the
course concludes:

The main obstacle toward the task
of doing anything regarding climate change is that the risks of doing
nothing (that is, continuing on the present path), the benefits of doing
something (that is, reducing carbon emissions), and the costs of the action
(more expensive energy), are poorly defined and are by no means balanced in
the same fashion between the various participants of the global community.
The next most important obstacle is explosive population growth combined
with the desire for a better standard of living. Yet another roadblock is
that fact that the science of climate change still gives rather fuzzy
answers to important questions, thus lending support to an approach of
maximum convenience that insists we need to know more before we should act.

I suspect that Prof. Wolfgang H. Berger, the course
instructor, and I do not agree on what US policy ought to be in the face of
these facts, but that's only a suspicion: his lectures are good examples of
reasoned discussion, and leave open the possibility that rational persons
can and will disagree on these matters.

This isn't a highly technical course: it's a general
introduction. Most readers can go through the entire syllabus of both parts
in a couple of hours, and many will learn something from it. Next week I'll
get to the letter itself, but I did want to call attention to Professor
Berger's course.

(I found that link by a Google search on Berger Climate
Change Policy in an attempt to find anyplace he has been involved in climate
change policy debates. I didn't find much; apparently he is more interested
in science than policy wonking. Commendable. It's an interesting book; the
indicated section is a discussion of positive feedback mechanisms and the
search for evidence thereof.)

================

It's allergy season again, and I'm using my nose pump again.
I find I haven't recommended this in a long time:

The link leads to a nose irrigation pump: it's the ultimate way to clear
your head when your nasal passages and sinuses are full of allergens and
junk. It works better than anything I know, and if you need it you really
need it. I use it with the stuff the company sells, although others make up
their own concoctions. I haven't been using it lately, and I should: I was
reminded by friends who still do. If you have sinus problems, you need this.

=================

Digging about in the archives
I found this
explication on Emergency Room economics including the costs of illegal
immigrants. Nothing has changed for the better since an emergency room
physician sent it in 2005. The conditions described are real, and the
situation deteriorates.

I have long said that the mail section of this site is the best mail
section on the Internet. There is a great deal of wisdom in those archives.

This is a day book. It's not
all that well edited. I try to keep this up daily, but sometimes I can't.
I'll keep trying. See also the
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